Financial

One of the areas of IP communications which is seeing tremendous growth is SIP trunking providers and suppliers and the reason is simple - the technology saves companies money and increases their telecom flexibility and ability to boost productivity. The move to SIP however is more challenging than just plugging a wire into a box. You need to be aware of security, quality and compatibility issues. But to buy legacy circuit switched equipment today is generally suicidal for a career so SIP trunking has to be on your immediate radar.

If you are looking for a single article which will illuminate the evolution of the Internet, the challenges regulators had when policing phone companies, the competition between cable and phone companies and net neutrality, look no further than this article from Fred Goldstein of ionary Consulting titled The Net that Got Away. In about 5-10 minutes you can read this well-written and historical article which describes how the Internet got to where it is today and how the Bell operating companies used regulatory sleight of hand to gain benefits from regulators in turn for promises that weren't kept.

This article discusses a book The $300 Billion Broadband Scandal by Bruce Kushnick, one of the biggest critics of the phone companies. Kushnick often complains about how the large phone companies have taken advantage of consumers and have broken promises repeatedly.

Recently the FCCreached out to Verizon Wireless to inquire about why it is raising early termination fees on advanced phones and in addition, the commission wants to know how consumers will be notified that they are purchasing an advanced device and how they will be informed of the prorated charges associated with early termination. This inquiry is in response to Verizon doubling its early termination fees on smartphones.

It will be interesting to see how the wireless company responds to the increasing ETF question but to me it is still obvious these costs are going up because advanced devices the company sells will now have superior functionality, allowing for services such as free GPS which Verizon can charge for on other devices. In other words these new fees cover the loss of potential revenue from enhanced services.

Some tech and political discussions from Day two of the show but really day one for me

I had a great set of meetings at Interop today and the energy at the show was quite inspiring. Talk of sales gains and the potential for acquisitions were common. In many of my discussions there was concern over the current administrations direction in terms of burdening small business owners.

I just came across this web page with some important details on ITEXPO. I mentioned the keynoters in a recent post and I still think they are one of the best combinations of thought leaders in our space. Google Voice, Sprint, Digium, Polycom, Skype and Verizon Wireless are some of the companies you will hear from at the show.

In addition there are a full eight conference tracks you cannot find anywhere else:

The netbook craze continues and as the devices proliferate, they can be found in places like superstores and perhaps even some local supermarkets in high tech areas of the country. San Jose, I'm looking in your direction. But does it make sense to take a computer which is really designed for thrifty consumers and stick it in an office? My vote is probably not because for a little more money you can go out and get a full-fledged laptop and in many cases this will give you more performance or as we like to say in the tech world, increased bang for the buck.

We are in the midst of a violent transformation of our communications networks which involves an immense amount of control being wrestled away from carriers and given to developers and end-users. Visit the iTunes App store or check out what is happening with free turn-by-turn GPS on an Android 2.0 device to get an idea of what I mean. The trend is not new by any means; the first time communications systems were allowed to interoperate with computer systems was in the eighties when the first Rockwell Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) systems started to communicate with IBM mainframes to give us CTI or computer telephony integration. This allowed screen pops which dipped into CRM databases allowing contact center agents to know who was calling and more than likely why.

The pace of tech acquisitions is not slowing and one area worth watching is the testing market where Ixia has recently picked up Catapult Communications to further its wireless IP performance testing strategy - especially as the company positions itself to be a leader in the LTE space. In a meeting in Ixia headquarters in southern California the company explained to me that they continue to focus on a broad range of testing areas such as Ethernet, 40/100 Gb Ethernet, devices, fiber channel, storage area networks and virtualization. And don't forget about some of the other areas the company plays in such as voice, video and data.

During SuperComm the company announced a new acquisition of certain assets of the Agilent Technologies N2X Data Network Testing Product Line and Kelly Malloit the company's director of PR explains the move to TMC's Erik Linask in more detail in the video below.

One area discussed by Kelly is the fact that this acquisition allows Agilent's customers to purchase a suite of complimentary testing equipment and moreover, through this move - Ixia becomes a far more international company and furthermore has a much larger focus on the carrier space.

In January of this year I asked if Eric Schmidt is cozying up to President Obama to protect a Google Monopoly. I took some flak for the post but the reality is the reality - the company seems to be taking over every facet of tech from book readers to voice to video to unified communications to cloud computing to photo sharing to video serving to office applications. Should I go on? How about turn-by-turn GPS?